Your Guide to Finding Great Configuration Management Tools

Configuration management tools can help you track and manage changes to systems within your infrastructure, making sure that your software and hardware runs reliably and smoothly. As we’ve said in other blogs about DevOps tools and best practices, often the tools are not the problem when organizations are rolling out changes — it’s the “why.” 

In this blog, we’ll take a step back to examine the “why” to better support your search though different configuration management tools. There are a lot of tools out there, but it’s important to know why you’re searching in the first place, and what your organizational needs are. Let the hunt begin! 

Table of Contents: 

• What are Configuration Management Tools? 
• Finding the Best Configuration Management Tools 
• Configuration Management Tools vs. a Configuration Platform 
• What is a Configuration Platform? 

What are Configuration Management Tools? 

Configuration management tools track and control changes that are made to systems and environments — hardware or software — to make sure that quality and compliance is maintained. 

Configuration management can broadly cover the different kinds of regular management that happens in your environment, such as: 

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): When you use configuration management within IaC, you are able to manage resources like servers, networks, and storage in a declarative way. 
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): CI/CD tools automate the “build, test, and deploy” pipeline, and can be configured according to the needs of the DevOps team managing this pipeline.
• Compliance as Code (CaC): Use of a similar declarative approach aligns configurations to industry best-practice security standards, such as the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) benchmarks. This eliminates policy drift and the ‘fire drill’ that often results. 
• Version Control: This tool tracks changes to files and allows users to revert back to files if needed. Version control can be configured according to what rules this process should follow. 

Even the term “configuration management” is a little misleading — it can refer to many different, sometimes very different, kinds of tasks that you need to perform in your environment. From updates to file access to compliance, the way that you configure your infrastructure from the smallest task to the largest requirement can make a huge difference. 

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When you look even further, yes, even the word “tool” is misleading. Under the umbrella of configuration management, you will find automation, compliance, and collaboration. The right configuration management tool isn’t just a tool, it’s a set of actions that can be performed under a holistic set of goals for your environment. 

This shouldn’t complicate your search for the right configuration management tools, but it should add additional considerations for your hunt. Let’s explore that further. 

Finding the Best Configuration Management Tools 

The “best” configuration management tool is always going to be the one that meets your specific needs.

Your Environment 

How large and complex are the systems that you need to manage? Are you working within a cloud environment, on-prem, or a hybrid of both? How many users do you manage, and how large is the team that is managing them? 

Your Budget 

The price of a configuration management tool that handles one task, like version control for instance, will vary from a configuration management platform that will handle everything you need to configure within your environment. We’ll explore more about configuration platforms in the next section. 

Your Specific Requirements 

Do you need configuration management to help with compliance? To automate tasks? To update or patch systems? Not every configuration management tool will be able to support every kind of task — it’s important to approach your search with this in mind. 

You’ll want to ask yourself: 

• Is it compatible and scalable with the current infrastructure? Configuration management software will need to play well with your current operating systems and scale to manage a growing number of nodes and team members that will need to access configuration management across complex environments.
• What level of automation will you need? If you are looking for deployment automation, policy as code enforcement, or the overall management of systems and applications, you’ll want to make sure the tool offers some level of automation.
• What are your industry compliance requirements? You’ll also want to think ahead for audits and generally ensure that active configuration is aligned with internal and external policy. 
• What are the security features you’re looking for? Your configuration management solution should make it easy to manage the security of automation infrastructure. 

This is where the search for a single tool becomes complicated — can one tool accomplish every requirement that your configuration management plan needs? 

Enter the configuration platform, which encompasses multiple tools. 

Configuration Tools vs. A Configuration Platform

 Configuration management tools set out to accomplish a set of tasks — but what if you need a solution that does more than just configuration? What if you are looking for a tool that also includes visibility into changes being made and automated alerts to let you know how a change could impact your environment? 

A configuration platform covers more than specific tasks. 

What is a Configuration Platform? 

A configuration management platform integrates multiple tools and capabilities for managing configuration and automation tasks across an entire IT environment. 

A platform includes infrastructure discovery, asset management, policy enforcement, and reporting and analytics. Configuration management platforms are designed to provide a more holistic view of an organization's IT environment and enable more comprehensive automation and management capabilities. 

Puppet Enterprise is an example of a configuration management platform, since it includes features such as: 

• Application delivery 
• Patch management 
• Continuous compliance 
• IT process automation 

While configuration management tools are focused on specific areas of functionality, a configuration management platform provides a more comprehensive set of capabilities across an entire IT environment. 

Puppet is More Than Just a Configuration Tool 

Puppet Enterprise is more than just a configuration management tool — we call it a platform for a reason. 

You can customize your Puppet Enterprise to work exactly how you need it to with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Comply — all different pieces of a larger platform that can help you holistically manages automation, compliance, change management, and other tasks across your environment while providing broad visibility and scalability. It’s this level of robust “can-do” management that really makes it more than a tool. 

We’d love to show you what we mean with a free demo of Puppet Enterprise along with the different features that are specific to your needs: 

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